MySpace and Facebook may say they reign supreme in the social networking space. They may even have the numbers to back them up. But when it comes to business networking, one site stands above the others: LinkedIn. In this article, I’m going to show you how to overhaul a LinkedIn profile and get it working for you.
I’ve said more than once that I don’t do SEO for a living. I don’t even do it consciously for the articles I write or edit for the Shed. Content comes first, right? I still believe that. Nevertheless, I’m about to engage in my first act of “real” SEO, right in front of you. Wish me luck; I have a feeling I’ll need it.
When I started my research on this topic, I was surprised by how little I know. I probably shouldn’t have been. LinkedIn has been around as a network since 2003; that’s plenty of time to create a huge user base and a slew of features. There is even a semi-independent website, LinkedIntelligence.com, with a blog that covers the many different ways you can use the online business network (and sometimes criticizes LinkedIn when it misses the ball). When it called for suggestions on smart ways to use LinkedIn, it received a veritable avalanche.
LinkedIn has added new features gradually throughout its existence, but the pace of innovation has begun to pick up at the company in recent months. At the time of writing, its newest addition is company profiles. I hope to cover those later in this article – which incidentally, given the sheer volume of my information, may turn into a two-parter.
Right now, though, if you don’t have a LinkedIn profile, or if (like me) you have a profile that has been sorely neglected, you might want to read along and take notes. My original inspiration came from Brian R. Brown’s post entitled “LinkedIn: Your SEO card file,” which appeared on CNet News Blogs. And then of course there was Guy Kawasaki’s blog on his LinkedIn extreme makeover; he did it more than a year ago, but it still came up in my research, so he must have done something right.
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